


Hotter Than The Surface Of The Sun

by Ankaret



Category: Sanctuary (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 13:00:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ankaret/pseuds/Ankaret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sex, wine, sarcastic pillow talk, giant psychic hermit crabs from Sumatra - it's just another slice of life for Ashley Magnus and Nikola Tesla.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hotter Than The Surface Of The Sun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sparrowinsky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparrowinsky/gifts).



The Sanctuary has many rooms. Some are grand; some are spacious; some are kept at a steady pressure which exactly matches that at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, or have a very reliable heat-dispersal system and a thermostat on the door with a large sign hanging on it reading _Do Not Touch This Dial_.

And some fit just two criteria; they are far enough from the main corridors to be out of the way of passing traffic, and they contain a sturdy bed.

In one of these bedrooms, there is a small fire in the grate. The small fire isn't anything unusual. It flickers across the panelled ceiling, turns the heavy velvet bed-curtains to shades of plum and chocolate and shadow, and warms the air, which is shivercold as Old City experiences an unseasonal cold snap. The unusual thing is that there's a lightning-bolt zigzag charred into the rug in front of the fireplace. Where it reaches the iron grate, the metal has melted.

And then there are the two people in the bed, of course. They're both a little out of the ordinary, even by the standards of this place.

Ashley Magnus rolls her shoulders back. Her arms and legs feel stretched and warm inside, just as if she'd spent the past hour and a half jab-cross-stomping enemy Abnormals off the roof of a half-built tower block, and the muscles of her core ache pleasurably. Her skin feels fluid like water touched by skittering lightning.

She props herself on her elbow and pushes her blond bangs out of her eyes, and looks down at the man in the bed.

She's dated her share of bad boys. It started with Tyler with his motorbike, and Alex who dealt drugs. Later on there was Galen, who could hook you up with a gauss rifle or a clip of HESB bullets that would drop not only a werewolf but the building the werewolf was standing in, and who only had a tiny little problem with mainlining illegally imported siren blood. And then there was Thyr Locke who... well, she'd never been absolutely sure whether he was part of a race of sneaky Norse Abnormals or whether he was just a world-class pain in the rear end who liked rough sex and unpleasant pranks, though she'd had her suspicions ever since the incident with the eight-legged horse.

But this - this neat narrow-shouldered man whose lips turn upwards in a satisfied smirk even when he's asleep - this is _really_ inappropriate. This redefines inappropriate, and ties it up in a neat package with a little decal of crossed fangs and a wine-glass on top.

Ashley leans over and slowly brushes the tip of her finger against his bare chest. The legends about vampires are wrong. He doesn't feel cold. He feels hot, alchemically hot, hot enough to give any human emergency room doctor conniptions. She presses her hand flat against the muscles of his chest and leans down over him.

"I know your secret," she breathes in his ear.

His skin tenses under her exploring hand, but his drawling voice is, if anything, a little bored. "You know the location of my secret wine cellar under the Via Veneto? I'll have to kill you."

"Worse than that." She tips her head sideways and gives her patented grin, the one that means _oh, you are so in trouble_. It's kind of annoying that he isn't looking. "I know you're only doing this to get back at my mother."

"So cynical and yet so young. Pass the claret."

"Is that some kind of vampire euphemism?"

"It means my throat's dry." A small frown crosses his brow, lifting the eyebrow that quirks up enquiringly even in repose. "I'm not as young as I used to be."

"I noticed. All the pictures of you when you're young have really dorky hair."

"It was very fashionable at the time. The moustache, too. The ladies of Prague used to swoon in the street."

"In your dreams."

"I dream of Prague in the 1880s all the time. You should have seen how your mother could dance."

Ashley scowls. "Ugh, Nikola, that's not sexy, that's just _creepy_."

"But I do both so well," he says with a smirk. With his eyes still closed, he leans up towards her, into the bubble of private space that she always keeps around her. It's not that she's uptight. She's just reflexively _cautious_.

Right now, all the small senses that sound the alert when she's about to get into a fight are firing off like small fireworks under her sking, telling her that he's a threat. Telling her he's dangerous. Like she didn't already know.

His breath caresses the tender crease between her jaw and her neck. Ashley feels hot summer-lightning shivers all the way down into her shoulder. Nerve-endings are nothing but tiny lightning-conductors after all. She arches her back and leans into the breath. The damp ends of her blonde hair brush the pillow. Nikola's hand slides up her side with a warm firm pressure that makes her skin prickle with desire. It cups her breast, briefly, then comes to rest on her shoulder. She gives a tiny satisfied gasp that is almost a purr, and lets him push her down onto her back.

The bedcover is embroidered with small seed-beads and scratchy gold thread. Ashley has no idea where her mother got it, though it might have been 1920s Uzbekistan. Right now, it's rucked up under her thighs, making a sensual small scrape that reminds her of just how exposed the rest of her skin is. Her body is bare to the crisp winter air. Bare to his hands and his mouth. Bare to his depraved imagination; and she already knows exactly how depraved that imagination can be.

As he leans over her, she hears the tiny _snikt_ of his fangs trying to slide forward in his jaw. They aren't the small polite pearly fangs that one might expect, if one were a human brought up on legends of vampires. They're a snaggled tangle that makes his jaw bulge outward. Everything about his body language is saying _danger_.

Right now, danger is exactly what she wants. Ashley wasn't brought up on legends. She was brought up _by_ legends.

She tilts her shoulders and her hips up towards him. It's a challenge. It's always a challenge between them. That's what makes it so good. "Are you just going to hover over me all day like some kind of Abnormal vulture-hybrid? I'm meeting a contact at six, and before that I promised I'd help Henry work out some kinks in the surveillance camera network."

"Oh, I can believe you're good at working out kinks." Nikola's mouth shifts back to its usual shape. His mouth is too thin-lipped and too broad to please an aesthetic critic - but God, the things that mouth can do. And when he grins, it's like his grin could stretch round the world. Ashley feels a pleasurable shudder go all the way up and down her spine like a soft elevator. She licks her lips and waits.

Nikola leans over and _past_ her, as if he finds her about as interesting as a decorative table-runner, and reaches for the dusty carafe on the bedside table. He pours himself a glass of wine. "But I told you. I'm thirsty."

Ashley glares at him. He tips his head to one side in a mocking little salute to her, and removes himself to his own side of the bed again. He sits up, shirtless, and sips the wine. Truth be told, Ashley has seen a lot of men who look more memorable shirtless, and that's not even counting the guy with the chest-mounted tentacles hidden under his leather duster. Compared to some, he's kind of scrawny. But right now, kind of scrawny is exactly what pushes her buttons. Scratches her itch. Pushes the big red button on her personal rollercoaster.

Besides, his grin is all kinds of delectable. She'd want him even if he wasn't forbidden.

But forbidden is just what he is. Untrustworthy, half-vampire, a hundred and thirty years her senior, and then there's the emotional history between him and her _mother_...

Ashley often wonders whether there's something _wrong_ inside her. Something to do with her strange upbringing, perhaps, or something spoiled in storage during the long cold century between her conception and her birth. Or, worse, something locked inside the serpent gift of Druitt's DNA, waiting to come true like a baleful promise.

Her mother did her best to give Ashley a normal upbringing, but it never really worked. For as long as she can remember, Ashley has felt as if there was an unbreakable wall between herself and the rest of the world, a wall that no one else can see. A wall sealing her in with the monsters.

She wouldn't mind, except that the monsters are all so freaking sarcastic. There's Henry, there's the Big Guy - who can get sarcasm into the smallest lift of one hairy eyebrow - and now, there's Nikola Tesla. She leans across and punches him in the arm, hard enough to bruise. He lifts the wine-glass to her and makes a mock-hurt face.

"Oh, don't give me that look," says Ashley scornfully. "Everyone knows how fast you heal up."

"And so do you." He puts the glass down tidily on the other bedside table and wriggles himself luxuriously downwards onto his back, folding his forearms behind his head. "I thought at first that you were just heavy-handed with the concealer, but - "

Ashley makes to punch him in the arm again. This time he reaches out and catches her wrist before her fist can connect. Most people aren't fast enough to catch her, but then, he isn't most people. She twists her hand in his grip, looking for the advantage, but his long fingers locked around her wrist might as well be solid steel for all the purchase she can get. His nails grow longer, sliding ivory-smooth out of their sockets, turning into claws the colour of yellowed bone. His thumb-claw very gently caresses the veins in her wrist. She shivers.

Nikola pushes himself up on one elbow and looks at her. "Seriously, Ashley," he says drawing the words out over his tongue so that she can hear the faintest trace of a foreign accent in them, like bitter herbs drowned in brandy. "Don't you ever wonder what you've inherited? From the Source Blood? From your mother?" He pauses. "From your father."

"I don't _want_ to think about that," Ashley says violently. "I don't want to think about _him_!"

Nikola's hand relaxes fractionally about her wrist, and she takes her chance. In a blur of coordinated movement, she flips him down onto his back, and now he's the one who's being held down. His brown hair is tousled against the pillow. His collarbones lift under his skin, making shadowed hollows that she wants to kiss.

Ashley settles into a more comfortable position astride him and leans forward, her breasts brushing his skin like a promise. His hard cock is trapped in the small hot fold between the hard muscles of her thigh and the place where it wants to go. She can feel her own pulse in the skin where they touch, a swift twitching drum-beat in her calling out to the electricity that rages in him.

Nikola turns his face and plants a swift kiss on her left hand, where it's holding _his_ hand captive against the pillow. Ashley shifts her arm a little closer. Nikola presses his mouth to her wrist again. The rest of his body is utterly still, his considerable strength held in check. Only the tiniest twitches of muscle show that he's alive at all. And the heat, of course. There is always the heat. His tongue makes hot small circles of desire against her wrist and she feels utterly liquid inside, mobile as water. She wonders luxuriously who taught him to do that.

She wonders how long that person's been dead. And then, because she can't help herself, she wonders whether it was Nikola who killed them.

Impatient, not wanting to spoil the moment, she lifts her hand away from his mouth. Her hands slide along Nikola's arms and down the sides of his ribs. A shudder runs through him. She rolls her shoulders back, lifting her breasts and the straight blonde hair that spills over her shoulders. She locks her knees closer around his lean hips and sits back on her haunches, surveying her captive. His shoulders and chest are a neat compact landscape, all smallness of elegant bone. She can almost feel the sizzle in the air between them.

"You don't look so bad for a man in your hundred-and-fifties," she says, and it's the honest truth.

He turns his face to one side against the pillow again in an impatient, almost scornful little gesture. Ashley watches the muscles unwind in his shoulder and throat. She loves that, the dance of muscle against bone.

"This isn't about age. It never was," he says with a harsh note in his voice. "This is about _knowledge_. You think I can help you unlock the powers that must have inherited from your father and mother, the secret code inside your blood. Or - no, that's not it, exactly. You think that if you watch me, it'll help you work it out on your own."

Ashley isolates her thigh-muscles and squeezes tighter. That's good, it adds to the feeling of waiting arousal that lives in the muscle-memory. And it makes him shudder again, which is a bonus. "I have no interest in watching _you_."

"That's a shame. I always did have an interest in three-way... rotating magnetic fields."

Ashley leans down and slaps him in the shoulder. Her hand leaves a red mark on his skin. It fades as she watches. Nikola looks up at her under his lashes and then lets his head fall to the side, a seductive gesture of surrender. But she knows he's still playing for the advantage, even now that he's utterly at her mercy; she can feel it in the tiny muscular shifts and adjustments of his body underneath her. Ashley _knows_ bodies. She knows their limits. In a strange way, she trusts them. Her mother's kingdom is books and databases, but Ashley's realm is blood and flesh.

Nikola's watching her, and she's suddenly afraid he can read her thoughts. Her body language, at least, she's sure he can read that. And she might trust bodies, but she doesn't trust _him_.

"Bored with this game," she says. He's there for the taking, and she lifts her hips and takes him. His cock slides home. One of them gasps, and she isn't sure whether it's him or her. "Oh, yes, right _there_," she says under her breath.

"With you seated at that angle, there are a limited number of options," he says on a ragged breath.

"_Now_ you're being sarcastic?"

"Why change the habit of three lifetimes?"

Ashley starts to roll her hips back and forth faster. He is more than a match for her, driving his hips upward in rhythm with hers, lifting her. It's true, really. Once you go super-strong and super-fast, you never go back. He reaches out to steady her hips with his hands. The skin of his hands isn't hot, it's so cold it's burning. Or maybe it's so hot it's cold, she doesn't know any more, there's just the sensation, overloading her body until she thinks it's going to trip a fuse. He lifts his shoulders and buries his face in her breasts. His mouth finds her nipple, and oh, my God, that's a shot of pure electricity sizzling all the way down her nerves from her toes to the crown of her head. She wouldn't be surprised if the electricity was visible, blue like a corona around them.

His hips thrust upwards so hard that Ashley's knees lose contact with the bed and she gets a much better look than she was ever expecting at the dusty folds of velvet that swirl up to make the bed's canopy. The bed's shaking hard enough to dislodge the dust. Ashley throws her head back and laughs so hard she nearly loses the moment; but for once it's laughter that tips her over the edge. The anvil-head of stormclouds inside her breaks into a thousand rhythmic shudders, pulsing up her spine and down her thighs like her body's been carjacked by sensation.

She's leaning backwards so far that where her hair isn't sticking to the film of sweat and dust on her shoulder-blades, it's almost brushing his knees, and she's still shaking with feathery little aftershocks of laughter and delight. With one last teasing pulse of her hips, she tips him over the edge.

The veins in Nikola's neck pulse. His eyes film over with blackness. He clenches his fists as he collapses back against the feather mattress. He reaches blindly over the side of the bed for his medication. The vial tips over and starts to tumble for the floor. Nikola's jaw convulses forward as his teeth extend.

Ashley's combat reflexes are screaming instructions at her. He's a dangerous Abnormal, he's going to turn on her at any moment, he needs to be _put down_. It's only two steps to the nearest weapon. Her gun, right there in the discarded holster amongst the trail of clothes abandoned on the floor. Five seconds away. Three, if she takes the distance with a combat roll.

She twists sideways and grabs for the vial instead, catching it in the palm of her hand before it reaches the dusty floor. She's surprised she made the catch, considering that her body's still trembling all over with the overload of sensation. But her muscles don't let her down. She slaps the vial into his palm.

His hand shakes as he opens the vial, but the claws are already receding. When he looks at her again, his eyes are their usual dark blue, the colour of a really nice worn-in pair of jeans. They still don't look quite human; but then, if you look really closely at his eyes, they've never looked human at all. They are too quick; too calculating; too guarded. Too magnetic.

Ashley reaches out and caresses his face; the small rise of his Slavic cheekbones, the thrust of his jaw, the shape of his crooked mouth. "Thanks for the sparring practice," she says wryly.

"Thanks for the medication." He flops onto his back and stares at the bed's red velvet canopy. Ashley does likewise. However much dust they dislodge, there always seems to be more up there. At this part, she's almost starting to wonder whether there's some small voyeuristic Abnormal living up there and excreting dust. She gives it a nasty look, just on spec.

"If your father found out, he'd teleport me to a point directly above an erupting volcano and drop me," says Tesla with satisfaction. "The only question is whether he'd rip me limb from limb first."

For once, Ashley doesn't feel like arguing about her father. Her muscles are full of a sated looseness that almost hurts. "It'd still be better than Mom finding out," she says, changing the subject. "I told you that was why you were doing this."

"If I wanted to be with your mother, I'd..."

"Be out of luck?" says Ashley. "I know you've got issues with her. It's OK."

"_I'm_ doing this because I have issues with Helen?" he says, unperturbed. "Monster-hunting pot, meet half-vampire kettle."

"Gee, that's all I need to get me back in the mood," says Ashley sarcastically. "Nothing turns me on like the thought of a half-vampire kettle."

"There was that incident when your mother decided to go and collect those giant psychic hermit crabs from Sumatra."

"Giant crabs, even sexier. Nice going, Nikola."

"They were in the middle of their moulting cycle. Apparently one of them actually did make its home in the kettle."

"You have the most bizarre idea of pillow talk I've ever heard."

"Your experience is limited." His hand drifts downwards, stroking down her side to her hip, waking sleepy echoes of thunder. "Fortunately I'm prepared to undertake your education."

Ashley had never met anyone who could swagger whilst lying down before. She doesn't actually believe that he managed to hide himself away for sixty years of the last century. It's not that she thinks that the Cabal or the security services would have found him; it's that she can't believe he wouldn't have popped out of hiding at least once just for the pleasure of being a smart-ass to somebody. "Go on, then," she says lazily. "Educate me."

"Someone once told me that the temperature of lightning can be five times hotter than the surface of the Sun," he says, his hand playing up and down her spine. "We didn't know the precise measurements of either when I started out, of course - we barely had spectroscopic analysis, let alone a thermometer that would work after the mercury melted. But I knew there was power there waiting to be leashed - waiting to be _un_leashed, under the proper circumstances - and that was what made me take up electrical engineering. All that energy. All that _potential_."

"Nice story, but I bet you just stole that interesting fact from Watson."

His hand slides smoothly round the front of her thigh and starts exploring deeper. Ashley doesn't feel like she's going to come again for a while. Her flesh is slow, sated, smooth. She gives in to the teasing pressure of his fingertips anyway. It's even better when she knows that those fingertips could at any moment become claws. Her breath starts coming a little faster.

"In a confined space," he says, his hand cupping tightly against her flesh and bone and then resuming the slow, maddening building of sensation that makes her want to kick the bedsheets, "there can exist both longitudinal waves..." a skitter of sensation that made her wonder exactly how many nerve endings were packed into that tiny terminus of blood vessels and skin, "and transverse waves." He follows that up with a long masterful arpeggio movement that makes Ashley understand exactly what's meant by having someone in the palm of your hand.

She blushes. She's never met a man who can make her _blush_ before. "I bet you didn't learn _that_ from Watson," she says on a breath that's half a gasp.

"I don't tell another man's secrets. I do have _something_ of a code of honour."

Nikola's narrow fingertips are still exploring the slick and complicated territory of her, and she's not sure she can remember _how_ to breathe. "Yeah, the famous engineer's code of honour. I've heard of that."

"It's a shame no one taught it to Edison." His smile shows the pointed tips of his teeth. "Then again, Edison's dead, and I'm in bed with you. I win. Again. Just like I always do."

"I'm not some kind of trophy," says Ashley, revolted. "What do you think this is, a game show? _Win Helen Magnus's Daughter_. Ugh."

His fingers settle to a slow-pulsing rhythm, and he looks at her alertly, like she's some kind of complicated technical puzzle. "You don't even know _what_ you are yet," he says, as casually as if they were discussing the vintage of the wine in the decanter. "And yet you worry about it like you don't _realise_ you have centuries to figure it out in."

A small shudder of discomfort runs under the surface of Ashley's skin, and she grabs his wrist and lifts his hand away from her thighs. _It's not a premonition_, she tells herself. _It's not anything_.

"In my line of work, I could die tomorrow," she says harshly.

"In our line of work, we could all die tomorrow." Nikola closes his eyes. "The trick is to be too clever to die."

Ashley swings her long legs out of the bed and reaches for her bra, which had somehow got hung over an ornamental gas-light. "Okay, that you _did_ steal from Watson. Being too clever to die is his schtick, from all I've heard. Being too untrustworthy to die, that's yours."

Nikola pillows his folded arms behind his head and looks lazily over at her as she pulls her clothes on. "I expect you'll never sleep with me again," he suggests suavely. "That'll show me."

Ashley lowers her brows and gives him another look. This one is the _oh come on, you have to be kidding_ look she's been practicing since she was fourteen. It works on everyone - humans, Abnormals, even occasionally inanimate objects or the weather. The only person it consistently bounces off is her mother.

She's not sure it works on Nikola as well as it might. She throws a pair of pants at him. "I'm going to help Henry bug-check that camera installation like I promised. Put those on and go do something useful."

"Same time tomorrow?"

"You wish." Ashley smooths her hair down with her hands and adjusts the knife in its sheath in her boot, and strides out of the room. Tesla watches her go.

She'll be there. So will he.

For tomorrow, and all the tomorrows that remain for them.


End file.
